What Susan Rice’s White House Promotion Means

June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Except when it’s best served hot.

Just a few months ago, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations and now President Barack Obama’s choice to be
the next national security adviser, saw her main chance to
become secretary of state dissipate before her eyes, as Senate
Republicans (with John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the lead)
excoriated her for, as they saw it, misleading the public about
the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi,
Libya, last year. (My thoughts about the attacks on Rice can be
found here.)

Rice was forced to withdraw her name, and Senator John
Kerry was awarded the job. Now Rice will be, in effect, Kerry’s
supervisor. McCain and Graham, by turning Rice into the
scapegoat of the Benghazi debacle, have inadvertently allowed
the president to bring her into the innermost ring of power, in
a role that requires no Senate confirmation.

In the highly centralized White House foreign-policy and
national-security operation (critics would call it
overcentralized, and they have a point) the secretary of state,
even one of Kerry’s stature, does comparatively little to set
the administration’s overarching policy. Kerry seems to spend
most of his waking hours pursuing a semi-quixotic Middle East
peace plan. It will be Rice’s job to interpret the president’s
broadest wishes and put them into place across several
government departments.

Payback

Her influence will be especially pronounced, I think,
because she is part of Obama’s original foreign-policy team --
in what could have been a near-suicidal career move, Rice, a
former official in President Bill Clinton’s administration,
signed on to Obama’s campaign when his victory didn’t seem at
all assured.

In the period when the Senate’s scapegoating of Rice was at
its peak, Obama seemed frustrated by the manner in which she was
treated. Her appointment today is partly payback for her
loyalty, and a thumb in the eyes of her Senate critics. It is
also a sign that the president and Rice are in sync on a broad
set of issues, and here is where it gets interesting.

Rice is known as a liberal interventionist (as is the woman
being named to replace her at the UN, the writer and former
National Security Council staffer Samantha Power), but advocates
of greater American involvement in the Syrian civil war, the
most acute problem Rice will face in her new position, will be
disappointed to learn that she isn’t particularly optimistic
about the effect that any U.S. action -- such as imposing a no-fly zone -- will have on the war’s outcome.

Rice, like the president, seems focused on the possibility
that the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime could mean a
victory for al-Qaeda-like groups that represent some of the
strongest elements of the Syrian opposition. The Obama
administration is desperately seeking to avoid the creation of
terrorist havens in Syria, because they would represent a direct
national-security threat to the U.S. and would require an armed
American response.

The American experience in Libya -- not the Benghazi
attack, which was searing in its own way -- has also chastened
Obama’s national-security team: The intervention on behalf of
rebels fighting the late, unlamented dictator Muammar Qaddafi,
may very well have saved thousands of innocent lives, but the
fallout from Qaddafi’s overthrow (the rise of al-Qaeda-like
groups, the spread of Libyan weapons across Africa, the general
misery and instability that now afflicts the country) has taught
Obama’s advisers, Rice included, important lessons about the
unpredictability of intervention. Politically, the
administration has seen no upside to the Libyan intervention --
it was criticized for recklessness by both Democrats and
Republicans -- and in a very political White House, these
domestic considerations often take precedence.

Formative Experience

That said, Rice is, by disposition and ideology, a strong
advocate of American power, and her formative experience in
government came when she watched, impotently, as hundreds of
thousands of people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide in
1994. The Clinton administration had the power to intervene but
didn’t. Rice is committed to preventing other Rwandas, but
notably, I’m told, she doesn’t see what is happening in Syria as
the equivalent. At least not yet.

Rice has been known as a tough, sometimes brusque,
operator. She suffered, post-Benghazi, because she had
previously made little effort to befriend senators and members
of the news media, among others. But lately, perhaps in
preparation for a job she suspected was coming her way, she has
become more, well, diplomatic. Not diplomatic enough for some:
One of the darkly humorous moments of the Benghazi witch hunt
came when some Republicans complained to me that Rice had
manhandled the Russian delegation to the UN. This may have been
the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution that Republicans
were worried about the feelings of senior Russian officials.

I suspect that McCain and Graham will come, over time, to
appreciate Rice’s toughness. I’m not sure I can say the same for
the trio of aging white male ex-senators -- Vice President Joe
Biden, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Kerry -- who believe
themselves to be at the core of the national-security operation.
Susan Rice is not Condoleezza Rice, who was steamrolled on more
than one occasion by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, when she served as President George W.
Bush’s national security adviser. Susan Rice won’t be easily
outmaneuvered.